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Stephen Colbert on D&D

For the past two years, Stephen Colbert has served as correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His career began at the Second City improv troupe in Chicago. There he met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, with whom he later developed the sketch comedy series, Exit 57. Recently, he reunited with them to create Comedy Central's first-ever live-action narrative series, Strangers With Candy. Below he captures his memories of Dungeons & Dragons, detailing what the game meant to him and how it changed his life.

In the spring of 1976 I was in seventh grade. I had been reading science fiction for two years and had just started bleeding over into fantasy.

One day at lunch I overheard my friend Keith saying, "I listened at the door, and I didn't hear anything, so I went inside and got attacked by a giant rat!"

I said, "What do you mean, you listened at the door? What are you talking about?"

Stephen Colbert

They said, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but in this game called Dungeons & Dragons there's a probability that you'll hear something through a door, and my character's a thief so he can hear better. The game just came out. Come over Friday and we'll play."

I did and was instantly hooked. A whole new kind of game. No board -- just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.

We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I'm not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that's how outcast we were.

D&D made quite a little explosion when it first came out. We were close to the Bible Belt, and ministers were preaching on TV against it, saying that it was a cult, telling stories about kids going too far, playing in the sewers and getting swept away when it rained or getting carried away and believing that the games were real and hurting each other with swords or trying to do incantations, demon worship. I remember thinking, "Who'd be stupid enough to believe this was real?" And, while I certainly wished it was real at times, I was sure these were boogyman stories made up by preachers who didn't like the implications of stories like Tolkein's, and by what they believed to be dabbling in the occult.